By Aditya Kalra, Lisa Barrington and Arpan Chaturvedi
NEW DELHI (Reuters) -The father of the crashed Air India flight’s captain said officials from India’s accident investigation bureau visited him last month and implied his son cut the fuel to the plane’s engines after takeoff, correspondence obtained by Reuters showed.
Pushkar Raj Sabharwal, 91, emailed the Federation of Indian Pilots (FIP) last week to say that Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) officials had visited him at home on August 30 “under the pretext of offering condolences”, and implied his son, Captain Sumeet Sabharwal, was the one who moved the fuel switches.
“During this interaction … they went beyond their mandate – speaking in innuendos and insinuating, on the basis of selective CVR (cockpit voice recorder) interpretation and a so-called ‘layered voice analysis’, that my son had moved the fuel control switches from RUN to CUTOFF after take-off,” the September 17 email said.
The day before the AAIB visit, he wrote to the civil aviation ministry – in a letter dated August 29 – to request India’s government open an additional investigation into the deadly crash, criticising what he said were investigators’ “selective” releases of information, which had led to speculation about his son’s actions.
The crash of Air India flight 171 in June, moments after it took off from Ahmedabad, killed 241 of the 242 people on board the Boeing Dreamliner, as well as 19 on the ground.
A preliminary investigation report by the AAIB showed the plane’s fuel engine switches had almost simultaneously flipped from run to cutoff just after takeoff.
The AAIB did not respond to Reuters queries. On Thursday, a Reuters reporter seeking comment was stopped by building security and denied access to Pushkar Raj Sabharwal’s home in Mumbai.
The FIP condemned the AAIB visit and said it had “taken up the matter” with the minister of civil aviation.
“In any court of law the judge or the prosecutor does not go to the house of victims and cross question individuals,” Captain C.S. Randhawa, the organisation’s president, told Reuters in a text message.
India’s civil aviation ministry and Air India did not respond to Reuters requests for comment.
‘INTEGRITY’
Pushkar Raj Sabharwal, himself a former official of India’s aviation safety regulator, in his email to the pilots federation requested its support for a fair, transparent investigation.
The AAIB’s preliminary report in July said one pilot was heard on the cockpit voice recorder asking the other why he had cut off the fuel. “The other pilot responded that he did not do so,” the report said, without identifying who said what.
A source briefed on U.S. officials’ early assessment of evidence in July told Reuters the cockpit recording of dialogue between the two pilots supported the view that Captain Sabharwal had cut the flow of fuel to the engines.
The first officer was at the controls of the Boeing 787 and asked the captain why he had moved the fuel switches into a position that cut off supply to the engines and requested that he restore the fuel flow, the source told Reuters.
“My son’s dignity and the integrity of due process must be preserved,” Pushkar Raj Sabharwal wrote in the email to the pilots federation, calling the investigator’s alleged remarks “procedurally improper and professionally indefensible.”
In July, the AAIB urged the public and media to refrain from spreading “premature narratives” that risked undermining the investigation’s integrity.
In his letter to the ministry, Sabharwal’s father said the “speculation” had caused him personal anguish, adding another investigation by the government would help in “safeguarding the truth and ensuring the safety of future passengers.”
This week, India’s Supreme Court asked the government to respond to a separate public interest litigation seeking an independent investigation into the crash.
(Reporting by Aditya Kalra and Arpan Chaturvedi in New Delhi and Lisa Barrington in Seoul; Additional reporting by Dhwani Pandya in Mumbai; Editing by Kate Mayberry)
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